Restaurant conventioneers to give soup kitchen extreme makeover

Mark Gomolla, director of facilities for Red Robin Gourmet Burgers, right, and Ron Wilhite, a general contractor who is president and owner of Tampa-based Regions Facility Services, are co-managers of the makeover at the Christian Service Center’s Daily Bread.

Mark Gomolla, director of facilities for Red Robin Gourmet Burgers, right, and Ron Wilhite, a general contractor who is president and owner of Tampa-based Regions Facility Services, are co-managers of the makeover at the Christian Service Center’s Daily Bread.

After 4.5 million meals served, Orlando's busiest lunchtime soup kitchen is in need of more than a little TLC.

The Christian Service Center's Daily Bread — where 300 homeless and impoverished people gather for a free meal six days a week — operates out of a 31-year-old kitchen and dining hall with a leaking roof, falling ceiling tiles and an ailing air-conditioning system. The parking lot is pitted by potholes big enough to swallow a Yorkie.

The whole place is dark, dingy and poorly designed. But that's about to change.

The Restaurant Facility Management Association has adopted the Daily Bread for a massive makeover that officially launches Saturday with a volunteer work day of at least 150 association members. Many of them are from out of town and traveling at their own expense to clean, paint and plant sod.

"It was hard to know where we wanted to stop because there was so much need," said Tracy Tomson, executive director of RFMA, a trade association. "But we're trying to focus primarily on the kitchen."

Over the next five to six months, professionals will replace the roof and ceiling tiles, add windows and LED lighting, tear out walls and add doors and a security system. They'll reconfigure the kitchen, add a commercial cooler and walk-in freezer, create a covered outdoor patio from a weed-strewn patch of dirt and build a pair of offices so people who need help with housing, health care and other aid can meet in private with a case manager.

There will be space for a culinary training program to help the unemployed find jobs. Trees will be trimmed, a security system added — and, yes, parking lots repaved.

"I'm not sure this work would have ever been done without them," said Robert Stuart, the Christian Service Center's executive director. "I mean, they could have come in just to make everything look nice, and we would have been grateful. But they came in and said, 'Tell us what you really want to do here.'"

Trade groups that host annual four- and five-day conventions in Orange County often undertake community service projects for a few hours or even a full day as both a gesture of goodwill and a team-building exercise. But RFMA's project is in another league.

In 2011, it launched its RFMA Gives mission with an extensive makeover of the Someone Cares Soup Kitchen in Southern California, where it was then holding its annual meeting. Each year since then, projects in the host cities — from Denver to Dallas to Murfreesboro, Tenn., outside Nashville — have gotten bigger and costlier.

In 2013, the group did a $300,000 makeover of the kitchen at Midway Safe Harbor Center, near Sanford, a neighborhood where median income is about $25,000 a year. The place offers kids an after-school meal and teaches high-school students and parents about cooking and nutrition.

"We're very proud of that," said Ron Wilhite, a building contractor and CEO of Tampa-based Regions Facility Services, who is co-manager of the Daily Bread makeover. "But this will be bigger."

In Orlando, the work at the Daily Bread involves an estimated $400,000 in new equipment and professional labor donated by RFMA — not including the value of the volunteers' work.

The group chose the Daily Bread after calling for applications from local nonprofits. "We came to them and said: 'If you could wave a magic wand, what would you add?'" Wilhite said. "They had quite a list."

Mark Gomolla, director of facilities at Red Robin Gourmet Burgers, another manager of the makeover, said the response from his fellow RFMA volunteers has been heartening. Though the project won't be completed and unveiled to RFMA conventioneers until next March, members have already made site visits to Orlando to see how they can help.

Two weeks ago, an Arizona plumbing contractor flew in to figure out which kind of water heater to donate.

But perhaps the best news for the people who rely on the Daily Bread is that it won't close during the renovations. Even on the occasional days when the kitchen is unusable, the charity will bring in donated boxed lunches for its patrons.

"RFMA is either restaurateurs or vendors that serve restaurants, and they know how to work around a functioning business," Gomolla said. "When we saw everything they needed, we knew we were perfect for them."